Manage your online identity.

Thanks to Adam Rice, who pointed out that our ClaimID Wordpress widget wasn’t valid XHTML. He sent along a handy fix, which we’ve added and uploaded. You can download the latest ClaimID Wordpress Widget (zip file) here . Thanks Adam!

If you follow the identity space, it’s likely you’ve encountered the work of Chris Messina.  A longtime advocate of open standards and sane identity solutions, Mr. Messina’s influence was felt very early on in the ClaimID development process.  In fact, we owe him a lot of thanks for helping us think through the possibilities of many very new technologies.

For these reasons, we’re following Chris’ work on DiSo - Distributed Social Networking Applications.   He’s working with Will Norris and Steve Ivy to create a framework for applications that leverages open identity standards - OpenID, the emergent OAuth.  This framework will ensure distributed, trustworthy data and identity portability between applications, ensuring what some might call distributed social networking.

In the past few months, there’s been much talk about this idea of distributed social networking: Google’s super-standard OpenSocial, Facebook’s Platform - we’re seeing the possibilities (and the downsides) of opening up our stacks.  Of course, to the major players, this is a new land-grab; this is why Messina and co’s approach is so attractive.  Our data, the stuff that I choose to share, should be free and portable.

Needless to say, we’re paying close attention to the work on OAuth and DiSo - hopefully in a few weeks we’ll have some interesting announcements regarding our brainstorming for feature development using these new methods.  This is very powerful stuff, and we’re glad to see it coming to life.

It sort of took us too long to get our act together regarding this, but we’ve finally added some ClaimID mailing lists. These lists will be an unmoderated place where ClaimID users can meet and discuss, find solutions to problems, request (gulp) features ;), etc.

Right now we have two mailing lists. The first is claimID-users, which is the general purpose mailing list. This is the list everyone should be on. You’ll find out about new features, requests for testing, that sort of stuff.

The second list is claimID-developers, which is a list for people building applications that use the claimID API. If you’re on this list, be sure you’re also on claimID users. We expect claimID-developers to be a low-traffic list for the time being.

In other news, the big weekend maintenance went well - there’s more work for us to do, but we’re getting it done. We hope to be making some fairly big announcements in the next week or two. We’re in Boston in a few hours for the identity mash-up. See you there!

Josh Peek has produced a nice little snippet showing how to use the ClaimID API with Ruby. This should come in handy to folks working to integrate a custom ClaimID feed into your blog, mobile app or whatever. A sincere thanks to Josh for creating this - we’ve also linked to this snippet from our internal API page as well, should you need it.

In other news, we came across a fantastic post covering ClaimID from the new PostBubble blog (a joint venture of ACS and Webreakstuff). I really took this post to heart, so I wrote a personal reply over on my blog. If you’re interested in what people say or think about us, I’d recommend a read - this post really captures the essence of the problem we’re trying to solve. Here’s a snippet:

It is visionary, it has the flexibility to go everywhere, and it solves global problems that are only going to become more global as time goes by. There is more to claimID than just managing your online identity. ClaimID is going to become a currency for individuals. It will be your online credit card, drivers license, or even alter-ego. It’s like oxygen. It is pervasive, will be everywhere, and has the chance to do so many different things that trying to isolate a simple business model and predict where it will go is like predicting the weather. We all know how good our weather prediction is, I don’t need to spell that out. So this is what bothered me about claimID. Those guys are onto something that will be so normal I can barely articulate why its so good. All I can say is good job, you’ll swim because you are Normal.

Finally, if you’ve developed anything with the ClaimID API that you’d like to share, drop us a line and let us know. We’d love to link to it here, and on our internal pages.